something. And, honey, they’re good.”
Jillian tried letting this sink in, attempted to feel the truth in Elise’s words. The paintings were well drawn, well executed, but good? That was a judgment, not an absolute, an abstract instead of a truth. What was good about doorways that led nowhere, openings that only revealed glimmers of dark, terrible universes beyond?
For some inexplicable reason, the doorways reminded her of Steven. The dark tower? Was that why she’d thought he could explain them to her?
Elise said something else, something about the new “jeweled” effect in her recent work.
Jillian asked her, hearing the angry note in her voice come through, despite her attempts to quell it, “Do you know why my new paintings all have that jeweled effect, that brighter-than-bright sheen to them?”
Her friend murmured an uneasy negative.
Jillian felt her lips curve, but she knew it wasn’t in a smile, unless this time it really was born of bitterness. “They’re that way because the whole time I’m painting, I’m crying. And I paint what I see.”
She heard Elise murmur a placating something, but her heart was pounding so loudly, the words didn’t penetrate. She couldn’t sit there any longer. The restlessness that had so thoroughly claimed her during the past year triggered, and forced her into action. She moved back to the window and stared out at the courtyard.
Steven was no longer absorbing the dying rays of the setting sun. He was standing facing the doors, just in front of the pile of leaves, looking as though he’d risen from them, a golden phoenix from unburned ashes. His hands hung loose at his sides, the rake abandoned against the trunk of the apricot tree at the far south end of the courtyard.
His eyes were open now, and filled with light, as if he truly had taken in the sun’s rays and transformed them into a startling green. The color was oddly out of place in the late-afternoon desert Southwest, and was as luminous as the jeweled colors in her paintings. Blazing emeralds.
It was at least three seconds before she realized she was gazing directly into his eyes, staring at him, frozen, and when she did, she felt strangely linked with him, her heart pounding in a strange combination of fear and poignant recognition.
Had her swift rise from the table called his attention, or had he been watching her all along, as she all too often watched him?
She could read nothing in his closed expression, no understanding, no pity, yet she felt a powerful emotion emanating from him all the same. That emotion wasn’t tenderness or concern, nor did it seem to carry any nuances of sexuality or even sensuality, though he certainly exuded all of those things on a physical plane. But whatever he was thinking or feeling seemed to radiate out from him like an aura taking flight, dark and filled with purpose, but its meaning obscured, hidden from her. She could have sworn she felt it race across the distance, and gasped at the raw intensity of it.
Shock rippled through her. He’s like my paintings, she thought, and instinctively raised her hand between them, laying her palm against the cold glass. Was she reaching for him, or warding him off?
She could feel his power, and didn’t understand it. He was dark and light at the same time. Extremes. Sharp contrasts and angles, hidden messages and sparkling truths.
Staring at him, linked with him, she felt words form in her mind. Were they coming from him? No, from within herself. Again, like her paintings.
“Jillian?”
“Dark with excessive bright.”
She had murmured the words aloud, almost like a talisman. Or were they a plea?
Why hadn’t she looked away from him? Why was she continuing to stand there…locked in his gaze? And what was it about the words dark with excessive bright that had so captured her thoughts, snagged her memory?
Then she remembered. Steven had said the words the other morning while clearing the overthick woodbine from the side of the house. What had he meant then, and why had the words seemed to hold so much more than mere statement in them?
“What’s that from?” Elise asked.
“What?” she asked faintly, as though from far away. She couldn’t break his gaze, felt she was drowning in it, dizzy, aching. What was happening to her? She felt as if one of her dark doorways were opening slightly, and if she stared at him much longer she would see the roiling clouds with the haunted, hungry eyes seeking her.
“Earth to Jillian. I said, ‘What’s that from?”’
Steven Sayers—the gardener, she reminded herself, half hysterically—looked away first, turning his head as though purposefully ending this unusual connection. He walked slowly back to the apricot tree and took the rake in his left hand. Without looking back toward the house, he resumed his careful tending of the pile of leaves.
Jillian fought nausea, found herself shaking and raised trembling hands to hug her suddenly cold shoulders. Her grandmother, had she still been alive, would have said a wolf had just passed over Jillian’s grave. She knew it was far more serious than that, far more real. If she’d stayed linked with him a moment longer, she knew, she would have lost herself somehow.
“Sounds like something I’ve read,” Elise said.
“What?”
“That ‘dark with excessive bright’ thing.”
Jillian drew a deep breath before turning around. “I don’t know. It sounded familiar to me, too, but I…don’t remember where I…read…it.”
“Shakespeare? Donne? Maybe Spenser? It doesn’t sound like a standard biblical verse, but I could be wrong.”
Jillian’s chill fell away as swiftly as it had come upon her. She moved back to the table, but didn’t sit down. Was she subconsciously signaling her need to be alone?
She leaned against one of the high-backed oak chairs and said, “I always forget you’re a scholar.”
Right now she wished Elise were really the white witch she professed to be, could really see into one of her myriad crystal balls and explain what Jillian had just experienced. Because it had been something. Or as Allie was fond of saying lately, something beautiful. Beautiful in the sense of “awesome,” a concept with a dual-edged sheen, at one and the same time both exceedingly lovely and woefully dangerous.
Elise winced and waved her hand. “You’re the scholar, sweetie, remember? You’re the one who reads everything known to man. Before you started painting, anyway. Maybe that’s the secret to your art, you bring it a little old-worldliness.
“Anyway, nowadays, scholars do research and get to read all the time. They’re eligible for Nobel Prizes and a billion grants. I’m one of the publish-or-perish crew, remember?”
Elise stood up and shook her pleated wool skirt as though such an effort would remove the long-creased wrinkles in it. “Speaking of which, I have an abstract I have to finish by Thursday, and this being Monday and I haven’t even begun reading the material, let alone writing the damned thing, I’d better set my sights on the computer—”
Allie burst through the front door at that moment, bringing a blast of chill air with her as she sprang into the dining room.
